Model railroads bring parents and children together

ON ANY GIVEN SUNDAY

August 3, 2014|By Jeff Kunerth, Orlando Sentinel

There is something terribly old-fashioned about a model-train show. Nostalgia so thick you can almost smell it. Grown men still playing with the toys of their youth. Old guys pining for the lost days of steam locomotives. Remembrances of the basement train layout of childhoods spent in places where they had basements.

And then there is this: fathers and sons, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, spending time together.

"It's our one-on-one time," said Chad Chorak, 38, attending the Great Train Expo at the Central Florida Fairgrounds on Sunday with his 6-year-old son Adam. "I enjoy the time I spend with my son. We have that bonding time like I had with my dad."

It's not kids playing solitary video games or texting their friends or parents flipping through their smartphones or texting their friends. It's a father and son spending time together constructing a layout, assembling a train, building miniature houses and stores. But much of what takes place while model railroading has nothing to do with model railroading.

"While you're building the railroad, you can talk about other things. It might be something that is bothering him, but he hasn't said anything. While we're building the train, this will be the chance to say something," said Chorak, of Oviedo.

This parent-child model-train bonding isn't exclusive to males. Tonya Howard was at the train show with her son Christopher Parrish. Tonya's father had a train set and her 10-year-old boy wants one, too.

In her son's interest in model trains, Howard sees a boy filled with imagination and curiosity. He's the kind of kid who, when he sees real railroad tracks, wants to follow them into the horizon.

"He wants to see where they go and where they end," said Howard, 31, of Orlando.

Louis McTague is 54 and still has the HO-scale train he got for Christmas when he was 7. His has passed on his love of toy trains to his 8-year-old daughter.

"I just like the darn things," said McTague, who is now into large-scale garden railroads. "For me, it's re-creating a world in miniature."

Nine-year-old Patrick Wojcik inherited his father's interest in N-scale trains. It's one of the few things they can do together. Jack Wojcik, 45, has progressive multiple sclerosis, a disease that has robbed him of the ability to walk and is now taking away the strength in his hands.

At the model-railroading show, Wojcik maneuvered his motorized wheelchair carefully around the train layouts and vendors, Patrick sitting on his lap wearing a striped engineer's cap. The father and son scouted the vendors selling trains and accessories for the new layout they have planned for the train room in their Kissimmee home.

This one, built above the old one, will be a digital train set that allows multiple trains to run on the same track. They are building a legacy in miniature with Patrick taking over where Jack's muscles are failing.

"My hands don't allow me to work on such a small scale. This is why my son is taking over," Wojcik said. "To pass my passion onto my son is beyond description."

Model railroading is a way for a father and son to create their own world together from scratch. It may be an attempt to re-create the past, but it may also be about inventing the future.